Why Do These People Live Among The Chronically Homeless?

At Community First! Village, a tech executive, a radio host, and families with children choose to live among the formerly chronically homeless. Why? Because, they say, it’s what Jesus would do.

by robyn ross | photography by randal ford

Published: December 12, 2017

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The Cromers
From left: Polly, Scout, Aidan, Cherisa, Piper, and Keagan outside the 300-square-foot RV that they call home.

"Everyone asks, ‘Why would you do this?’” Cherisa Cromer says, sitting down at the picnic table outside the RV she shares with her husband, Aidan, and their four children. “Why would the six of us live in 300 square feet? Why would we come out to a place where formerly homeless people are living and let our kids run around?”

The September evening is still, the air neither warm nor cool. Faint strains of country music drift over the fence from the adjacent subdivision. Cicadas hum in the trees, their whirring song punctuated by crickets that begin to chirp as the day fades to dusk. Inside, Keagan, 13, Piper, 10, Polly, 7, and Scout, 2, are eating veggie burgers and watching The Lion King. Cherisa starts to answer her own question when a man wearing Crocs approaches, spatula in hand.

“Hey, Ellis,” Cherisa calls. “What’s going on?”

Ellis Johnston leans against the picnic table. “I’m cooking chicken and sausage for my buddy Tony. I thought it was going to rain.” Overhead, the sky is a filmy gray, tinged with violet from the setting sun. “You ought to come out tomorrow. There’s going to be 250 people here for that movie the Alamo is showing.”

“You cooking?” Aidan asks, cocking an eyebrow.

“Just hot dogs and stuff. Frito pie. Corn dogs.”

“It’s a party,” Aidan says. They shake hands, and Johnston waves as he saunters back to his grill.

“When we sit outside, we always get visitors,” Cherisa says.

Four years ago the Cromers had been living what Aidan calls “the standard American life.” They had a house in a nice neighborhood, their kids went to good schools, they were involved in a church—yet they were restless and unsatisfied. “It just felt like, ‘Is this it?’” he says. “The American dream didn’t live up to what we thought it was going to be.”

They decided to downsize, radically, and move into an RV, where they assumed they’d spend more time interacting with neighbors. But RV parks didn’t seem to foster a sense of community any more than the neighborhood they’d left. Everyone still spent most of their time inside. As Christians, the Cromers felt God was nudging them toward a purpose, but they weren’t sure what that might be until they learned about Community First! Village, the 27-acre housing development for the formerly homeless launched in late 2015 by nonprofit Mobile Loaves and Fishes.

Located about 8 miles east of downtown, just south of the Travis County Exposition Center, the village houses more than 170 residents. In early November, MLF announced an ambitious 10-year plan to mitigate chronic homelessness in Austin. The cornerstone is a $60 million capital campaign to fund an expansion of Community First and more than 1,000 additional homes. Groundbreaking on an adjacent 24-acre parcel with potential for 350 more home sites is scheduled for next year

Initially the Cromers just planned to volunteer at the village, but MLF founder Alan Graham asked if they wanted to move in themselves. Now, instead of suburban houses, their trailer is surrounded by other RVs and tiny homes housing people who’ve experienced chronic homelessness and who may still struggle with mental illness and addiction. The three older kids share a slide-out compartment, where their beds are packed next to books, backpacks, and clothes. Cherisa, a choir instructor at Elgin High School, teaches them piano on a keyboard wedged next to a wall of the master bedroom. The kids often roam the community, including its playground, community garden, and a fence line where donkeys on the neighboring property visit at dusk.

Aidan says living at the village is a way to put into practice the most important biblical commandment: “Love God, and love your neighbor as yourself.”

“Jesus came and spent a lot of time with the undesirables,” he says. “He didn’t spend a lot of time with the people who had it all together. He actually got on to those people for not sharing their lives with the undesirables. He did the opposite: ‘All you dirty people, the lepers and the dirty rotten thieves, and the tax collectors, let’s party. Let’s hang out.’

“I see that here. Our neighbors were the people that were sleeping in the scum of the streets, and now they’re transformed. They’re the people that we trust our children wholly with.”

The Cromers are one of 17 households (including couples, families with children, and individuals) known at the village as “missionals,” who, unlike their neighbors, have never experienced chronic homelessness. Like their neighbors’, their move to the village is meant to be permanent. Graham’s mantra is that the cause of homelessness is a “profound, catastrophic loss of family,” and Community First is an attempt to cobble together a new family for people who’ve lost their own.

The village is also a place where ordinary Austin residents can go to volunteer and build relationships with people in need. Most opportunities for people to “serve the homeless” involve a transaction of some kind, Graham says: A volunteer puts food on the plate of someone in a soup kitchen line. A driver hands spare change to a panhandler. Community First is designed to replace those transactions with relationships formed while volunteers and residents work alongside one another in the garden, in the art studio, or on construction projects. Moving to the village as a missional is the ultimate expression of what Graham calls “a lifestyle of service.”

“My model simply came from looking back at spiritual leaders over 2,000 years and what they do,” he says. “Mother Teresa chose to go live in the bowels of Calcutta, India. Francis of Assisi gave up extraordinary wealth in order to go live and be amongst the lepers. And the population we’re dealing with are the most despised outcasts of our community—the chronically homeless. The men and women who are stereotyped as drug addicts, alcoholics, crack addicts, glue sniffers, prostitutes, gamers, hustlers.”

Graham’s plan is for 20 percent of the village’s population to be missionals: residents who bring stability to the community by modeling behaviors like holding a steady job, keeping their trailers and lots tidy, volunteering, and getting to know their neighbors. He and his wife Tricia are among those who have moved to the village.

Prospective missionals embark upon a six- to 12-month discernment process. They meet and pray regularly with current missionals to determine whether they’re a fit. (Most decide they’re not, Graham says.) Along the way, they volunteer at the village to build relationships with residents, and they undergo a background check.